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Liberty and Justice for all

Liberty and Justice for all: Much of the first, far too little of the second.

The person who wrote the original American Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 was a man by the name of Francis Bellamy. He was a Christian Socialist, and a Baptist Minister. He saw the importance of emphasizing not only Liberty as a fundamental virtue and goal of American society, but Justice as well.

In today’s world, we hear American leaders speak loudly and often about promoting Liberty, and Freedom as well, but I have yet to hear an American President speak about Justice.

Does this mean that in our post Communist world, that we feel we can simply dispense with justice, now that we no longer have the threat of Godless Communism on the left flank of our ideological spectrum?

Does the principal of elemental justice put too much of an upward push on the cost of labour, and the overall cost of doing business? I would say that, in the final analysis, we can’t afford NOT to allow the cost of labour and of business to go up in this world.

Emerging market countries need to be allowed to emerge, and this means that wages have to go up in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa, as well as here in the West. Otherwise we’re stuck with the eternal problem of the ‘Race to the Bottom’, whereby our obsession with preventing inflation here in the West, crushes down people in the rest of the world by preventing their standard of living from improving.

I feel honestly that people in the West would be ready, willing, and able to pay modestly more for their goods that they buy at Wal-Mart et al., if they knew that a part of the increase in price was going to improve the lot of the workers in China, or elsewhere.

Allowing the cost of doing business to go up is also beneficial in the sense that it allows proper structures of civil governance to emerge in the countries in question, with properly functioning civil administrations to establish and maintain law and order, and to also build safe and prosperous communities with functioning civil institutions at the local, regional, and national level which can dispense services of all sorts in the fields of education, health care, social services, and environmental management.

We either allow these things to occur, or the masses will rise up and threaten the elite with massive amounts of working class violence, which ultimately will threaten public order, as well as the orderly production and consumption of goods and services, which is bad for everyone, including the elite.

If the elite aren’t willing to listen to these words, they may be too late to begin with, because Mother Nature may very well unleash her fury upon the planet and its public and private infrastructure before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’. As we all know ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/ Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned’.Maybe then, America the Beautiful, and its new President, and corporate elites, will rediscover the true meaning of the word Justice.